Two Lives Made of Wax
by FinnFiona
Summary: The candle drips onto the table between them until there's nothing left. Forms bridges and pitfalls, a map they know well, have traversed carefully. Paints a picture they shouldn't be surprised to see – a story. Their story. Clint/Natasha.


**Author's Note: **This is my first (and quite possibly only) foray into this fandom, so I must start by begging your forgiveness for any inadequacies.

Now that we have that out of the way, I hope you'll indulge me in this – I've been itching to get back to writing, and these two have been knocking about in my head ever since seeing the most recent movie. Turns out letting them loose onto the virtual page was the only thing for it.

The story structure is somewhat non-traditional, but I had fun with it, so bear with me. I hope you enjoy this, and please do let me know what you think.

**Disclaimer: **No, _The Avengers_ in no way, shape, or (super)form belongs to me, which is probably for the best.

Accompanying lyrics in italics borrowed (somewhat selectively and out of order) from the stirring, lovely tune _Head Full of Doubt, Road Full of Promise_by the Avett Brothers. Do give it a listen if you aren't familiar, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

* * *

_**One: A Welcome Chasm**_

* * *

_There's a darkness upon me that's flooded in light_

* * *

Natasha takes great pride in her skills. Well-honed and practiced as they are. Twisting. Shifting. Shooting, fighting, manipulating her way out of any dark corner and into an ever darker hole. There was a time she didn't think much about what she was using them for, these talents of hers, but he changed that.

Held his hand out, and changed it all.

* * *

_When nothing is owed, deserved, or expected  
And your life doesn't change by the man that's elected  
If you're loved by someone, you're never rejected_

* * *

"So love is for children?"

Natasha can read anybody, and it scratches at something deep within her gut that she can't tell if a smirk or a scowl is threatening to twist his upper lip.

"Then what's for us?"

* * *

_There was a dream and one day I could see it_

* * *

"Why would anyone bring kids into this world?" he mutters the familiar refrain.

Natasha purses her lips in grim agreement. He's tracing the scar on his right wrist – so faint you can hardly see it – going back and forth, back and forth with his calloused thumb, and she knows where his mind has slipped off to. Triggering a memory doesn't have to be complicated, after all, and sometimes their missions… the missions that involve children…

Well.

It prompts something carefully hidden within both of them.

She knows, though. Whether it's the orphanage that SHIELD has sent them to, or sitting on a park bench during what anyone else would insist is the most beautiful day in the world.

She _knows_.

She can always see when he's thinking of days full of hot sun and big red tents. And disappointment and backhanded slaps to the temple and loneliness. Even without the set of his jaw and the tendons taut behind his joints, that scar is his tell.

Natasha doesn't think she has any tells, but he says that she's wrong.

It's always in her eyes.

* * *

_And there was a kid with a head full of doubt  
So I'll scream til I die or the last of those bad thoughts are finally out_

* * *

She has too many voices in her head, each one begging for quarter. She loses herself too easily sometimes, hides herself amongst too many layers and can't remember what page she left herself on. Where the bookmark lies. How the trail of breadcrumbs leads back home.

She comes back, though. Comes back and starts the ritual. Drops the uniform on the floor. Stares down her reflection in the mirror until the visage staring back at her looks familiar, something like a former acquaintance of a long-lost friend.

She stands in the shower.

Watches the water pool around her toes.

Tries to let the sound of the water drown out the voices.

She doesn't think about the man she knows will be waiting outside her door when she emerges. The man who would wait there for days if that's how long it took.

Like any good sniper, she thinks. Chokes out half a laugh through the sobs that strangle her throat. It's her first smile in days.

* * *

_There's a darkness upon me that's flooded in light  
And I'm frightened by those who don't see it_

* * *

He's still tracing the scar on his wrist long after they've cleared out the shambles of a house, stand alone in the rubble. Natasha picks up a discarded toy from the floor, resists the urge to chuck it across the room. Breathes.

"Why would anyone bring kids into this world?" she borrows his line. He looks at her, all sharp angles, shakes his head.

Still, when they find the small, frightened girl hiding under the bed upstairs, the little thing that everyone else had missed – when Clint picks her up and brushes the dust from her hair and lets her cry into his shoulder – when he fits his chin over the girl's head just_ so_, moves back and forth slowly, ever so slowly… It's then, just for that little half breath of a second, that Natasha understands why someone would bring a child into the chaos.

Because men like Clint Barton would make good fathers.

* * *

_There's a darkness upon you that's flooded in light  
In the fine print they tell you what's wrong and what's right  
And it flies by day and it flies by night  
And I'm frightened by those that don't see it_

* * *

"I don't understand," he says at last. He hasn't moved from the gurney, but they need to get back to the others soon. No rest for the weary.

The wicked.

The damned.

What a pair they are.

She doesn't have any words for him, has never been so good with words that actually mean something, but the look on his face and the plaintive whisper of "Nat…" forces her to find some.

"It wasn't you, Clint," her voice is firm, the touch of her fingers at the back of his hand softer than any assassin has a right to be.

He turns his palm into her touch as if it's the easiest thing in the world.

Then again, somehow, it always has been.

"I should've been stronger," he sighs. "Fought him. If I had, then maybe…" his eyes close, and Natasha knows what counting the marks in your ledger looks like. But she doesn't like watching him do it.

"Loki was right about one thing," she speaks into the silence, raises their hands together to rest on his chest. "You have heart. But it's good and it's _yours_. Don't forget that."

* * *

_Decide what to be and go be it_

* * *

She might have spent hours in that shower, days. She hardly notices when the water turns cold, when she sinks onto her knees, when her tears become her own and not someone else's.

But she knows when she's ready. When the voices – angry, plaintive, tortured and malicious, bruising – subside enough to let some sort of truth back inside. To let his voice reach out to her. Start to build her back up. Start to put the little pieces of Natasha back together.

The little girl that breaks into a thousand jagged edges.

She learned American nursery rhymes as a child. Part of her training. Humpty-dumpty sat on a wall… had a great fall.

But Clint puts her back together again.

She pulls a towel around herself, feels the warmth start to seep back into her skin. Her hand hovers above the doorknob half a second longer than it probably should before she steps into her room.

He's sitting on the edge of her bed, just like she knew he would be. Just like always. No pity, no misguided sympathy in his eyes. Simple, unadulterated understanding.

Natasha decides to reward him.

She drops the towel.

* * *

_There's a darkness upon me that's flooded in light  
In the fine print they tell me what's wrong and what's right  
And it comes in black and it comes in white  
And I'm frightened by those who don't see it_

* * *

Hands are used for killing, in Natasha's experience. His hands. Her hands. But he held his hand out that time. That one time.

"Stay with me," her voice is flat, commanding, but his shaky smile says her eyes are pleading all the same.

Her hands are covered in blood. His blood now – and she isn't squeamish, but she doesn't want to look at it. Of course she doesn't want to look at it.

"It's deep." He isn't asking.

She nods. She doesn't lie to him. He might be the only one that gets her honesty. Always. No agenda.

She places his hands under her own. They're bigger than hers, but soon they're stained with just as much crimson. His hands.

He held them out to her. He held his hands out to her and now she can be proud of what she's doing. For once. Proud of what she's doing, not just how she gets it done. It's hard and it's often brutal, but she's cleaning up the red in her ledger and it feels good, and it matters. What she's doing matters.

Purpose.

Purpose is good, he says. Do things. Don't do things. The right things, the wrong things, everything.

Natasha really thinks he might die right here. No varnish on it. The thought crosses her mind like a thunderbolt and she thinks she'd pour all the world's red back in her ledger for a guarantee.

But he could. He could die right here, right here in her arms, her hands, and suddenly all of this – what he's doing, what she's doing, all of the _right reasons_– for the first time it doesn't really matter at all.

* * *

_There was a dream and one day I could see it  
Like a bird in a cage I broke in and demanded that somebody free it_

* * *

They spend so much of their time in darkness.

It's a dark world and a dark existence, but he was a beacon when she first met him and he hasn't stopped trying to raise the curtains in her life ever since.

Every night she gets to spend in his arms is a brighter one, somehow. A night with a morning that she can see coming.

And yet… Windowless bunks on carriers. Covert missions on stealth aircraft and in backwater alleyways. Nights spent staring out into the gloom, never sure what's around the next bend in the road. The darkness is as pervasive as the nightmares that he tries to steal away from her dreams.

But the first time Natasha wakes up next to Clint in the sunlight – the first time she opens her eyes to warm shadows on his face, tinted by the light filtering through her fiery locks – that's the first time she allows herself a glimpse of the future.

The first time her fingers don't linger too long on the scars of the past – the one on his wrist, the one from a wound she thought would be too deep, the one he took for her, the one he got when she should have been there.

The first time her hands don't stop on the muscles, strong and tested by the trials of the present.

He opens his eyes and the light and the hope and the future shine in them, too, until – just for a moment – she forgets about the darkness.

* * *

_And it flies by day and it flies by night_

* * *

"What's for us, Nat?" he asks again, and it's not a smirk or a scowl, but something worse – hurt and resignation, and not surprise. He knows who she is.

Better than she knows herself, she thinks.

"If love is for children, then what's for us?" he sighs when she doesn't answer, casts his gaze downward.

She moves forward to straddle his lap where he sits in the swiveling chair, but the little crease between his eyes tells her she's not getting off the hook so easily this time.

The words she shared with Loki were an attempt to learn, to entrap – and they were meant to shield herself and Clint from exploitation by a manipulative demigod hell-bent on using any wedge and barb that he could. But they weren't the wrong words, either. Not entirely.

After all, Natasha gave up on love a long time ago, saw it burn away with the remnants of her childhood until there was nothing left to believe in. The word tastes like ashes in her mouth now, like a promise long broken. But when she stares down at the man in front of her, she struggles for another word that would be adequate.

Because what do they have? They have everything. Trust. Life. Honesty. His lips on hers and her hands in his. Two heartbeats in one rhythm.

A partnership.

Someone tried to tell her what love was, once, and maybe this is it, but such a word doesn't seem like enough.

He watches her, ever so patient, and she knows that she owes him an answer.

Owes him so much more, really.

"There was a boy I knew, when I was very young," she starts slowly, enjoys the little twitch in his brow when he realizes he hasn't heard this story before. "This boy – he still had memories of his mother. Good memories, if very few."

She settles into Clint's lap a little farther, exhales as he clasps his hands at the small of her back.

"He used to tell me things that she would say," her voice grows stronger, remembering. "I think it helped him hold onto her, for a time."

"And what would she say?" Clint asks softly after a beat, and Natasha thinks her amazement may never cease at the kindness in his eyes.

"She said… she said that when two people are very, very lucky, their souls…" Natasha struggles to find the right words in English, "…their souls recognize each other, _share_ in each other. Become something bigger, stronger – more complete than they were before."

Natasha watches him, hopes he understands. But she doesn't have to wait for long. The smile that dawns slowly but steadily across his features in infectious.

She's still smiling when he pulls her down and kisses her soundly.

She clasps his hand tight, as tight as she can.

Promises never to let go.

* * *

_If you're loved by someone, you're never rejected  
Decide what to be and go be it_

* * *

**Author's Note #2: **If you think it worthwhile, I'm toying around with a companion chapter from Barton's perspective. In the meantime, reviews are always a welcome sight in my inbox!


End file.
